Each one of the 6 clients described has sex without ostensible shame or guilt - generally with different partners. The women - four of the six clients - all state that they don't feel much in the sex act. The motives of two of the women for going to bed seem to be to hang on to the man and to live up to the standard that sexual intercourse is "what you do" at a certain stage. The third woman has the particular motive of generosity: she sees going to bed as something nice you give a man - and she makes tremendous demands upon him to take care of her in return. The fourth woman seems the only one who does experience some real sexual lust, beyond which her motives are a combination of generosity to and anger at the man ("I will force him to give me pleasure!"). The two male clients were originally impotent, and now, though able to have intercourse, have intermittent trouble with erectile dysfunction. But the outstanding fact is they never report getting much of a "bang" out of their sexual intercourse. Their chief motive for engaging in sex seems to be to demonstrate their masculinity. The specific purpose of one of the men, indeed, seems more to tell his analyst about his previous night's adventure, fair or poor as it may have been, in a kind of backstage interchange of confidence between men, than to enjoy the lovemaking itself.
Let us now pursue our inquiry on a deeper level by asking, What are the underlying motives in these patterns? What drives people toward the contemporary compulsive preoccupation with sex in place of their previous compulsive denial of it?
The struggle to prove one's identity is obviously a central motive - an aim present in women as well as men, as Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique made clear. This has helped spawn the idea of egalitarianism of the sexes and the interchangeability of the sexual roles. Egalitarianism is clung to at the price of denying not only biological differences - which are basic, to say the least-between men and women, but emotional differences from which come much of the delight of the sexual act. The self-contradiction here is that the compulsive need to prove you are identical with your partner means that you repress your own unique sensibilities - and this is exactly what undermines your own sense of identity. This contradiction contributes to the tendency in our society for us to become machines even in bed.
Another motive is the individual's hope to overcome his own solitariness. Allied with this is the desperate endeavour to escape feelings of emptiness and the threat of apathy: Partners pant and quiver hoping to find an answering quiver in someone else's body just to prove that their own is not dead; they seek a responding, a longing in the other to prove their own feelings are alive. Out of an ancient conceit, this is called love.
One often gets the impression, amid the male's flexing of sexual prowess, that men are in training to become sexual athletes. But what is the great prize of the game? Not only men, but women struggle to prove their sexual power - they too must keep up to the timetable, must show passion, and have the vaunted orgasm. Now it is well accepted in psychotherapeutic circles that, dynamically, the over-concern with potency is generally a compensation for feelings of impotence.
The use of sex to prove potency in all these different realms has led to the increasing emphasis on technical performance. And here we observe another curiously self defeating pattern. It is that the excessive concern with technical performance in sex is actually correlated with the reduction of sexual feeling. The techniques of achieving this approach the ludicrous: one is that an anesthetic ointment is applied to the penis before intercourse. Thus feeling less, the man is able to postpone his orgasm longer. The prescribing of this anesthetic cream for premature ejaculation is not unusual. One male client, records Dr. Schimel, was desperate about his premature ejaculations, even though these ejaculations took place after periods of penetration of 10 minutes or more. A neighbor who was a urologist recommended an anesthetic ointment to be used prior to intercourse. This client expressed complete satisfaction with the solution and was very grateful to the urologist. Entirely willing to give up any pleasure of his own, he sought only to prove himself a competent male.
A client of mine reported that he had gone to a physician with the problem of premature ejaculation, and that such an anesthetic ointment had been prescribed. My surprise, like Dr. Schimel's, was particularly over the fact that the client had accepted this solution with no questions and no conflicts. Didn't the remedy fit the necessary bill, didn't it help him turn in a better performance? But by the time that young man got to me, he was impotent in every way imaginable, even to the point of being unable to handle such scarcely ladylike behavior on the part of his wife as her taking off her shoe while they were driving and beating him over the head with it. By all means the man was impotent in this hideous caricature of a marriage. And his penis, before it was drugged senseless, seemed to be the only character with enough "sense" to have the appropriate intention, namely to get out as quickly as possible.
This is a symbol, as macabre as it is vivid, of the vicious circle in which so much of our culture is caught. The more one must demonstrate his potency, the more he treats sexual intercourse - this most intimate and personal of all acts - as a performance to be judged by exterior requirements, the more he then views himself as a machine to be one's self feel less in order to perform better! Turned on, adjusted, and steered, and the less feeling he has for either himself or his partner; and the less feeling, the more he loses genuine sexual appetite and ability. The upshot of this self-defeating pattern is that, in the long run the lover who is most efficient will also be the one who is impotent.
A poignant note comes into our discussion when we remind ourselves that this excessive concern for "satisfying" the partner is an expression, however perverted, of a sound and basic element in the sexual act: the pleasure and experience of self-affirmation for a man in being able to give orgasm to his female partner. The man is often deeply grateful toward the woman who lets herself be gratified by him - lets him give her an orgasm, to use the phrase that is often the symbol for this experience. This is a point midway between lust and tenderness, between sex and agape - and it partakes of both. Many a man cannot feel his own identity either as a man or even as a person in our culture until he is able to gratify a woman. The very structure of human interpersonal relations is such that the sexual act does not achieve its full pleasure or meaning if the man and woman cannot feel they are able to gratify the other. And it is the inability to experience this pleasure at the gratification of the other which often underlies the exploitative sexuality of the rape type and the compulsive sexuality of the Don Juan seduction type. Don Juan has to perform the act over and over again because he remains forever unsatisfied, quite despite the fact that he is entirely potent and has a technically good orgasm.
Now the problem is not the desire and need to satisfy the partner as such, but the fact that this need is interpreted by the persons in the sexual act in only a technical sense - giving physical sensation. What is omitted even from our very vocabulary is the experience of giving feelings, sharing fantasies, offering the inner psychic richness that normally takes a little time and enables sensation to transcend itself in emotion and emotion to transcend itself in tenderness and sometimes love.
It is not surprising that contemporary trends toward the mechanization of sex have much to do with the problem of impotence. The distinguishing characteristic of the machine is that it can go through all the motions but it never feels. A knowledgeable medical student, one of whose reasons for coming into analysis was his sexual impotence, had a revealing dream. He was asking me in the dream to put a pipe in his head that would go down through his body and come out at the other end as his penis. He was confident in the dream that the pipe would constitute an admirably strong erection. What was entirely missing was any understanding at all that what he conceived of as his solution was exactly the cause of his problem, namely the image of himself as a "screwing machine." His symbol is remarkably graphic: the brain, the intellect, is included, but true symbol of our alienated age, his shrewd system bypasses entirely the seats of emotions, the heart. Direct route from head to penis - but what is lost is the heart!
I do not have statistics on hand concerning the present
incidence of impotence in comparison with past periods, nor does anyone else so
far as I have been able to discover. But my impression is that impotence is
increasing these days despite (or is it because of) the unrestrained freedom on,
all sides. All therapists seem to agree that more men are coming to them with
that problem - though whether this represents a real increase in the prevalence
of sexual impotence or merely a greater awareness and ability to talk about it
cannot be definitely answered. Obviously, it is one of those topics on which
meaningful statistics are almost impossible to get. There is
plenty of evidence that plenty
of men
want to get help with impotence. Whatever the reason, it is becoming harder for
the young man as well as the old to take "yes" for an answer.
To see the curious ways the new puritanism shows itself. you have only to see
an issue of Playboy to discover the naked girls with silicon breasts side
by side with the articles by reputable authors, and you conclude on first blush
that the magazine is certainly on the side of the new enlightenment. But as you
look more closely you see a strange expression in these photographed girls:
detached, mechanical, uninviting, vacuous. The typical schizoid personality in
the negative sense of that term. You discover that they are not "sexy" at all
but that Playboy has only shifted the fig leaf from the genitals to the face.
You read the letters to the editor and find the letter entitled "Jesus was a
playboy," since he loved Mary Magdalene, good food, and good grooming, and
castigated the Pharisees. And you wonder why all this religious justification
and why people, if they are going to be "liberated," can't just enjoy their
liberation?
Whether one takes the cynical view that letters to the editor are "planted," or the more generous one that these examples are selected from hundreds of letters, it amounts to the same thing. An image of a type of American male is being presented - a suave, detached, self-assured bachelor, who regards the girl as a "Playboy accessory" like items in his fashionable dress. You note also that Playboy carries no advertising for trusses, bald heads, or anything that would detract from this image. You discover that the good articles give authority to this male image. Harvey Cox concludes that Playboy is basically antisexual, and that it is the "latest and slickest episode in man's continuing refusal to be human." He believes "the whole phenomenon of which Playboy is only a part vividly illustrates the awful fact of the new kind of tyranny." The poet-sociologist Calvin Herton, discussing Playboy in connection with the fashion and entertainment world, calls it the new sexual fascism.
Playboy has indeed caught on to something significant in American society: Cox believes it to be "the repressed fear of involvement with women." I go farther and hold that it, as an example of the new puritanism, gets its dynamic from a repressed anxiety in American men that underlies even the fear of involvement. This is the repressed anxiety about impotence. Everything in the magazine is beautifully concocted to bolster the illusion of potency without ever putting it to the test or challenge at all. Non-involvement (like playing it cool) is elevated into the ideal model for the Playboy. This is possible because the illusion is air-tight, ministering as it does to men fearful for their potency, and capitalizing on this anxiety. The character of the illusion is shown further in the fact that the readership of Playboy drops off significantly after the age of 30 when men cannot escape dealing with real women. Interesting to consider this in the light of modern-day 21st century porn on the internet usage - statistics on the age of men using internet porn would be very revealing (and up to date stats would be even more interesting!).
The Revolt Against Sex
With the confusion of motives in sex that we have noted above - almost every motive being present in the act except the desire to make love - it is no wonder that there is a diminution of feeling and that passion has lessened almost to the vanishing point. This diminution of feeling often takes the form of a kind of anesthesia (now with no need of ointment) in people who can perform the mechanical aspects of the sexual act very well. Therapists are becoming used to the complaint from the client's chair that "We made love, but I didn't feel anything."